


No Longer There

by melliyna



Category: Criminal Minds, Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Dark, Multi, The 28th Amendment Universe, cm: family verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-15
Updated: 2010-09-15
Packaged: 2017-10-11 21:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/pseuds/melliyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek Morgan wasn't there when they came for them. Set in the 28th Amendment Universe created by bessemerprocess and in the Criminal Minds Kid-Verse created by me. Title from the song by <i>The Cat Empire</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	No Longer There

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bessemerprocess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/gifts).



Derek had wished he'd been there but there's a part of him that's always been glad he wasn't there, that last time. He'd left his family as his family. Dad, still smiling and cooking everyone breakfast (did he know, Derek sometimes wonders. The records have been lost, thus far - though he'd done what tracing he could but he has no idea if they were trying to get out of the country or not or what conversations he and Papa might have had) - Papa, making a game of Spencer's lunch box ordering. Pen, tiny Pen - dancing about the house and bestowing wishes on people. JJ, curled up on the couch with a heavy quilt and a book (she'd had a cold, Derek remembers - and a small bundle of curls and sniffles) and Emily, sketching quietly at the kitchen table.

That's the picture he carries, afterwards. The way the house must have still had unwashed dinner dishes and a pile of schoolbags and preschool backpacks and toys, scattered across the floor because they wouldn't have had a chance to tidy them away. Derek knows it was that sudden, now.

The news didn't come by any formal means - he'd been at band camp. An accelerated program for gifted students at Northwestern and well, he'd gotten lucky he supposes. The car broke down and so, when he'd gone to go home he'd been warned. A friend in the neighbourhood had texted him with a simple message 'don't come back Der'

It was when, that Christmas in Canada he'd seen the footage of Dad's execution that he'd finally understood why. Back then he'd just tried not to think beyond what he needed to think to survive. To get through the rest of the day, let alone turn the car around, with no idea of where to go and wanting to go back home - to get his things. To try to find them. To get a hug and have things be made okay. He can still remember wanting to find his stuffed animals and basketballs. All the birthday cards and the hand drawn stories that Papa had drawn and Dad had written. Even the baseball glove Dad Gideon had given him. That would at least, mean he was home. Would mean that he could be around the stuff that meant family.

Instead Derek had turned the car around and gone back. In those early days the Cedar Army was easier to find, easier to gain entry to (back then, people had thought it was just going to be another protest movement - just a matter of getting out in to the streets). He remembers the first death, the first beating, the very first purges.

He remembers the first bomb he set. He was thinking of his youngest brother, the way Spencer wanted to hug the ocean, the way he'd curl his fingers around yours if he wanted to be held and how Spencer cuddles were the absolute best cuddles you could imagine.

Derek Morgan doesn't know if his family is dead or alive and all he wants is to have been there. Been with them because at least then? He'd have known. He could have made sure that they all had their toys, that Emily didn't have to be the oldest child, that they had someones hand to hold. Instead he is here, in the cold and the forest - smuggling pamphlets and assembling bombs.

His group never gets found, though ironically he's busted for the pamphlets rather than the terrorism charges. Melissa was the one who got him out - she'd even hidden him in her house for a while and he'd played with her little girl. She has a room full of soft toys and smells the way he remembers Pen and JJ did. He broke down in tears, in the bathroom - looking at the bath toys and the bubble bath and Melissa had just held him and promised to try and trace his family.

She'd made him promise to make it to Canada. And when he did, it had been to The Farm, where he'd started to volunteer and see if he couldn't keep looking. It had been Rachel who'd told him that Rossi was dead (no more details had been known then) and Aaron was missing, whereabouts unknown. And that's when Derek Morgan decided his family was dead and gone. All gone, all over again.

So he'd gone to England, as it turned out. They hadn't known what else to do with him, between the six months he'd spent completely shut down and the well meaning mental health professionals who kept, uselessly, trying to make things better. At least England meant that no one would know him and look at him with a kind of pitying horror.

It turns out, sympathy hurts worse than anything.

In England he finds himself becoming the American refugee who doesn't want to talk about The Cause. When the Amendment is repelled he declines to go back, instead taking up the offer of British citizenship that was given to a limited number of young, unaccompanied migrants. He tries to run from it, but the file finds him anyway. Some of it. He learns that Aaron was killed the night his family was taken, that Rossi died at Christmas, near JJ's birthday and that the others had been sent to foster homes and that no more is known.

"There's too much confusion, in regards to the records. We believe that many may have been deliberately destroyed or lost in order to make tracing more difficult" is the note that goes along with the file, almost in an apologetic tone. Derek takes the note and throws it away.

For a long time he wonders why Rossi had let them take him away. He wonders who had tipped off the authorities that they were going, if they had been planning to go. Derek hopes that if there was an informer, it wasn't one of Rossi's team. That might have just made things that much worse. He decides not to try and trace his family.

He doesn't want to face them. He wasn't there, after all.


End file.
